Classrooms of the Future

There’s a real opportunity right now to reimagine and shift education as we know it. Although some are announcing the re-opening of schools, I don’t think we will go back to “school as usual” after everything that has happened in 2020. Here are three things that I’ve been mulling over the past few weeks that I offer my network as an invitation to talk about what we want schooling to look like in this new normal.

1. The use of public space in education. I interviewed an amazing student last week who spoke so enthusiastically about this idea. Using museums, parks, community event spaces, the outdoors, and pretty much anywhere else we used to take kids on fieldtrips to as the places of learning. Why do we confine children to the walls of classrooms and keep them contained inside all day any way? Why are districts and teachers still insisting on ticking the boxes of objectives we’re supposed to teach instead of engaging our students (even those as young as pre-school) with project-based, real-world learning? Isn’t this better preparing them for the workplace too?
2. Students and parents as leaders and co-creators of the learning experience. Students lead study groups, virtual meet-ups, and experiences with each other regardless of whether it’s a part of the curriculum or not. Why aren’t we figuring out how to engage our students as leaders during this crisis — especially the older students? We should be helping teachers identify leaders for their classrooms early to solve logistical challenges and enable social and emotional support of learners in every classroom. We could also even be leveraging parent leaders in classrooms to help support the learning that happens with the group. Why do we have an “every family for itself” attitude when it comes to our children’s learning instead of the approach of, “We’re all in this together; let’s figure out who has energy to help”?
3. The use of AI to help with the boring parts of education. As a teacher myself, I do find that students need strong foundations to be able to engage in higher level thinking. Some of the mechanics of what children and young adults need to learn, along with the repetition needed to enforce that knowledge can be handed off to a bot. I usually refer to this as the “skill & drill” of learning that enables students to have a strong foundation for the stuff that matters. An example of this in my elementary school writing classroom was a 10 minute exercise the beginning of every class where students were challenged to correct sentences and use a sentence starter to get their brains thinking about writing. By this point in time, we should be really leaning on technology to get the boring stuff out of the way so that educators and students have more time to ask deep, provocative questions together, explore things together, and create things together.

What else should be on the list? What is your vision for how school should look in the future?